Changesets Evolution with Mercurial

02/02/2013 08:00 UTC

The Mercurial (hg) DVCS plays a major role in the Mozilla infrastructure. For more than a year, a lot of work has been done on innocent history rewriting features. Rewriting history has always been a powerful but dangerous feature of DVCS. Recent changes in Mercurial bring new innovations that solve all of the intrinsic problems with the concept. This both eases the learning curve for new contributors and boosts the efficiency of power users.

This new changeset evolution feature follows the Mercurial philosophy: easy, safe and powerful. Mercurial now tracks changes at a very fine level improving probability of your changeset being reviewed, tested, restored to a previous version and allows people to collaboratively edit the same branch of the history in a distributed way. Users of the MQ extension in particular will be given new tools that allow a similar workflow without the current MQ drawbacks.

Presented by Pierre-Yves David

Recorded live in the Mozilla Devroom on Day 1 of FOSDEM '13 in Brussels.